While Bill Clinton entertained the world's press earlier this week in a Lizard's Thicket diner in South Carolina, he let his breakfast congeal. As the Democratic fight got down and dirty with the escalating slanging match between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the former president eschewed his food to address reporters. What was he thinking? Letting his omelet and grits go cold by the side of a Columbia highway is not only flouting Southern hospitality, it's dissing the food, and an Arkansas boy should know better. Grits are not just a foodstuff, they're as powerful a symbol of the south as you'll find – as Republican candidate Mike Huckabee knows all too well, boasting to South Carolina voters: "I know how to eat grits." Bill stands accused of being Hilary's attack dog this week, but could his culinary gaff cost her the nomination?

Food is ultra-important in the south. Hell, they are even proud of their fastfood joints, with the original Chick-fil-A considered a tourist attraction in Atlanta. At the end of last year, I ate my way around several states and in Charleston enjoyed the superlative results of culinary pride and one-upmanship. Restaurants such as Tristan's brought downhome cooking into the fine dining room with bowls of so-called she crab soup emboldened with celeriac root froth, hominy with pomegranate and tender ribs glazed with chocolate barbeque sauce. Up and coming chefs are to be found all over this small town, scouring rival menus and pimping up classic southern dishes. In the local food store, they offer cookery classes in a room off to the side and sell scary looking implements and leather aprons. These people take their cooking seriously.

Perhaps it is because so many young chefs have trained at the Art Institute at Charleston, an esteemed culinary school, that an obsessive competitiveness abounds – but they punch above their weight on everything food-related here. "Well now, Georgia has the name for the best peaches, but here in South Carolina the peaches are sweeter, yellower and, why, peachier," I was assured by a fine Charleston lady, Amanda Dew Manning, in her charming drawl. But fruit is merely the beginning. "Our pralines are better than any you'll find in New Orleans," the guy behind the counter of River Street Sweets insists – the confectionery perhaps improved by its 18th century journey across the ocean from France, all the way down the Mississippi river to its new home in the French quarter.

A bowl of grits ... is just the beginning in South Carolina. Heston Blumenthal would appreciate some of the state's recent concoctions
There is more than a passion for cooking in these parts; it's a food fight. While everyone in New Orleans is scrapping over how dark the perfect roux should be, the big controversy in Charleston appears to be over the best way to sauce pulled pork – with a tomato, vinegar or mustard concoction? But, ultimately, the fights are playful – in Charleston, they run a host of participatory events: pie workshops, cookie bake-offs, "dry heat" method classes, fish feasts and a competition to build gingerbread houses.

But if you're more into eating than cooking, head out of the main town for the higher ground of Summerville. The 30-minute drive winds around roads framed by oaks and magnolias draped in that beautifully haunting symbol of the south, Spanish moss. Tucked among the pine trees in this little town is a culinary gem - Woodlands Hotel, with Tarver M King in residence: an excellent young chef with a big belly laugh and a lot of ambition. He has worked at The French Laundry and spent time at Blumenthal's Fat Duck, and he has adapted the techniques he picked up to his own style of seasonal southern cooking.

When we visited in late autumn, King was trying to capture the essence of the season in his kitchen, sending out a squash-tasting menu – a bisque, poured by balletic waiting staff on to a rapidly dissolving milk and honey terrine, followed by a delicate risotto, scallop dumpling, butter braised chestnuts, rabbit with acorn squash puree and barley and bacon caramel, and finished off with a hot/cold foamy liquid concoction of which Blumenthal would have been proud.

Combine abundant seafood – crab, shrimp, wreckfish and seabass from the Atlantic – with cattle and chicken introduced by European settlers, okra, eggplant, yams and spices from Africa and native crops, apply indigenous and imported cooking techniques and you have a powerful culinary style. Carolinians are proud of their culinary heritage and draw on the best of it in contemporary cooking. Try it. Just don't – like the possible future president's husband – yabber so much it goes cold .